This invention relates generally to a water safety device. In particular, the present invention relates to a flotation safety device housed underwater.
In the United States alone, approximately 350 children under five years old drown in pools each year. Among unintentional injuries, drowning is the second leading cause of death for this age group, and another 2,600 children are treated in hospital emergency rooms each year for near-drowning incidents. Furthermore, adults also drown and become injured annually in pools.
In response to this, many different water safety (flotation) devices are found in the art, such as in U.S. Pat. Nos. 913,617, 4,549,871, 4,560,356, 5,030,152, and 5,823,840, and various monitoring and tracking systems have been devised, such as those disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,064,309, U.S. Pat. App. Pub. No. 2004/0121782, and U.S. Pat. App. Pub. No. 2004/0113836. While assumably effective for their intended purposes, the existing devices do not provide a flotation device that is housed underwater to assist a struggling person and that automatically alerts an emergency contact and activates a remote alarm. It would be desirable to have a safety device having these features in order to prevent or minimize injuries and to save lives.